[2] Born in Coboconk, Ontario, Ham attended Runnymede Collegiate Institute and received a B.A.Sc.
After the Second World War, he was a lecturer and housemaster in the Ajax division of the University of Toronto.
Ham was a Canadian pioneer in the teaching and promotion of research in the field of automatic control.
He was also an enthusiastic teacher of the fundamental principles of electrical engineering and was the author, with Gordon Slemon, of a textbook on that topic.
[6] He was chairman, Advisory Committee on Safety and Training, Royal Commission on the Ocean Ranger Marine Disaster from 1982 to 1985.
In 1980, he was made an Officer of the Order of Canada in recognition as a "scientist, engineer and scholar who has had a distinguished academic and administrative career".
*[7] He was posthumously selected as a 2014 inductee into the Canadian Science and Engineering Hall of Fame.